Microsoft has had their eyes on Yahoo! for a while now. They want more "mind-share". Personally, I'd rather see a few big players in the search market than a bunch of fragmented smaller ones. Yes, this is a hostile takeover. I still think it's for the best.

I can't speak for the other people who voted to blow it up, but I went that way because really I couldn't care less what happens to them.

You don't want competition? I don't like Microsoft's business practices but I still want them around because of competition. Actually I wish we had more competition not less, with more competition there's more progress.

Yahoo isn't being competitive though, they haven't been spending enough on R&D to keep up with what Google is spending.

Just because Yahoo! isn't spending as much as Google doesn't mean they not being competitive.

Personally, I voted for the Alderaan option just because of the sheer arrogance of turning down MS' huge offer trying to get more.

I was opposed to MS's offer too, and I've not invested in Yahoo! I want to start my own business and unless it were a humungous offer I wouldn't want to sell either. If I did sell I'd turn around and start another business.

There was a time where Yahoo was actually called the 800 pound gorilla of search. And yes, that was a long time ago, but it may explain the arrogance. I wonder what Google will do when it ends up looking back at its glory days.

Yeah, if there'd been a "I don't care" option, I'd have gone with that. But the prospect of an "earth-shattering kaboom!" was hard to pass up.

The only service I use much anymore is yahoo groups, and I'm sure there are other free mailing list services out there. Oh, and I like to be a jerk on yahoo answers. I'm probably better off without that service.

You're kidding right? If you want to share even mediocre quality photos, Facebook is useless. Max of 720px per side (unless things have changed recently) + compressed to all hell means you can't even place a decent quality 1024x768 desktop background on that site for others to enjoy. Never mind print quality.

There's plenty of nice competitors to Flickr, but facebook is not one of them.

Facebook does allow a "high resolution upload" mode, while the displayed image is still treated as before, the "Download" link becomes "Download in High Resolution". 8 megapixel uploads then download in 8 megapixels, but aside from comparing source to download resolution, I did not check to see if they strip EXIF or recompress the image in any way.

End users don't care about pixels or print quality. Only two things matter: The subject is more or less recognizable and emotionally important to them, and they are making the proper consumer statement of spending more than their social competitors, or spending more on travel and/or recreation than their social competitors.

All the 4000x3000 pixels in the world won't help if the photo composition, focus, depth of focus, and lighting are horrific.

Who is this "they"? I, for one, voted the Alderaan option because I think it should be blown up. Partly as an example (stop investing in R&D and offering a superior product? KABOOM), but mainly just because with Yahoo! Mail gone, the amount of spam from "trusted" domains would drop considerably.

Also, Yahoo's board deserves precisely this fate. You do not turn down an obscenely overpriced buyout offer unless you have some new development that is going to overnight make your company massively more val

Think about this: What happened to Alderaan? Would you say that "its entire planet was blown up" or that "it was blown up"? Considering that Alderaan was the planet, it would have to be option two. Phrasing -- it matters!

I like these two. I use yahoo mail as my main (private) email application. I would hate to see this absorbed into hotmail. I don't see them surviving on their own for much longer though. Bing and Google seem to be the two biggest at the moment, with google the biggest by far. Bing is the default on windows and google is a verb... yahoo is just not a search destination anymore. Back in the days, I used to use search.yahoo.com quite a lot. Simple design and quick enough. But, I guess the world will move on.

Well, they already screwed up Flickr. The instant they started putting advertising on pro accounts they saw most of the good talent leave. Now it's just HDR crap with no sense of composition. And the new interface loads so much slower, too. ugh. Why can't these companies leave good enough alone? Google's the same way, taking perfectly good components like their image search and turning it into utter crap.

Yahoo Auctions seems to occupy a place in Japan that eBay does in the U.S.. I believe there is a payment gateway system too owned by Yahoo. The only thing I use by Yahoo is Flickr, and I've been there before Yahoo was. I'd be glad to see it all burnt to the ground and started over. Even Flickr in all its greatness could use a reboot.

But it's funny that email today is becoming extinct like the postal service. Other than confirmations from online business there isn't much use for email. Person-to-person communication is rarely done over email anymore.

Hmm...not sure what planet you're from...but email is STILL very much alive and well.

I mean, maybe you don't have a real job yet...but in the business world, email still rules for the most part. Many businesses, especially if anything is secure at all, won't allow IM (at least not to the o

I only go on Yahoo because they bought eGroups (mailing lists), else, I about never went on it, and I'm on the net since about 1990, I was a lycos/altavista guy:)

I was using Yahoo! before it bought eGroups, I used Yahoo Clubs back then. After the switch to eGroups they went down though. One of them went from hundreds of posts a day to less than 100 post so far this year. I dropped out of others. For searches, I used mostly AltaVista and DMoz until switching to Google. But I still use Yahoo! mail.

They have Bing already - and doing a not-too-bad job there it seems. Honestly I don't see what Yahoo! could bring to MS in terms of search expertise. For that sake MS could save a lot by just buying out some key staff of Yahoo! instead.

And yes it'd be good to see Google get some competition. MS is probably one of the few companies big enough to set up something on that scale though, any other competitors would have to start from scratch (like Google did themselves - albeit with the help of a pretty decent

Because MS has done such a good job of all their online offerings to date?

I'm afraid that MS grabbing yahoo would mean the death of yahoo. Mind you, I haven't used yahoo in any meaningful way really ever. The internet, and the world are better off with Yahoo being Yahoo. We need more companies driving the internet, not less.

MS buying yahoo would be a bad call for MS as well. They don't need to spend more billions down a path of online presence than they're already haemorrhaging billions down, MS needs

With every improvement to email, TV listings, even the weather, the usability of each part of Yahoo just gets worse and worse. They can't even keep their *comics* page consistently updated. With every "improvement," I go somewhere else. The javascript options for each text field make things harder, not easier.

The best thing they could do would be to revert to what their site was in 1998. At least then, I could get to things and find information without wading through a sea of marketing trash and javascript

But without someone else coming in and mucking them up. Yahoo hosts my email for my DSL account, but I never login to their site for it, can't stand Yahoo's interfaces - buckets of annoying ads and such.

Although the original thread in Yahoo Answers is pretty informative, I do feel as though the responses don't really address the two clearly worded questions of the original poster. I see that the question has been asked again repeatedly in there since. If Yahoo could only just clearly answer the question once and for all, I might get behind them. Until then, my feeling is Alderaan chunks everywhere [adultswim.com]!

Doyou mean the adultswim link (the Robot Chicken episode "Dinner with Vader [youtube.com]") or the somethingawful link (best riff yet on the 'how is babby formed [youtube.com]' meme). I'm curious about which great firewall of greed might be blocking non-US addresses.

Like British Telecom in the uk for its broadband clients. Maybe outsourcing email may cost them a huge amount of time and hassle, unless they join the bidders for say the bits of yahoo they deem of value.

I have an old email account from Geocities. Yes, it still works, though I can only receive and not send.

When Yahoo bought Geocities, they folded all of the email accounts into their service, with a ".geo" appended to the end of the user name. So I have both a username@geocities.com and a username.geo@yahoo.com address.

I would hate to see what happens when Google buys their service, especially since I already have an account of theirs. My school decided decided to get Google-powered webmail accounts, so now

Sounds more like the metalwork or math teacher who wound up with the job of IT Admin saw the Youtube check box, thought 'I don't want students using that at school!' and unticked it, disabling Youtube for your account. Which probably doesn't stop you from watching Youtube videos. Find whoever's responsible and hit them with a clue-by-four.

Apologies if your school has competent IT, I'm judging based on my own experiences.

I use yahoo mail for one reason and one reason alone -- ISPs don't let you run servers off a domestic account so I can't run my own private e-mail server. I do, however, run yahoo mail on the most basic mode possible because they can't write javascript. They also can't write a secure API - I've run across situations where I've upset script kiddies and had my account permanently cycle round to the re-authenticate page.

GMail is adequate for some things, but I almost dislike the interface more than yahoo mail

I still us them for all my throwaway email accounts I know will fill up with spam. Whatever would I switch to?

I set up another gmail account a while back ( a few months after yahoo started sporadically sending "undeliverable" replies to all my corporate junk mailing lists, prompting even more junk mail asking to update my email address:-P )

Works pretty well, I can now check both gmail accounts direct from my Android phone, log into both at once from gmail, and uninstall my Yahoo! mail app.

I use google aps for my email and I literally set up an account called spam@mydomain.com. I use it for all the things that require an email but that I don't want spamming my inbox. The spam account unsurprisingly gets a ridiculous amount of spam. I also have an alias for my account called NOSPAM which really throws off the email crawlers.

Been hearing of Yahoo and Twitter for years... visited both places a handful of time... never found anything I looked for on Yahoo but they were happy enough to spam the screen with a dyslexic's nightmare worth of clutter. Still have no idea what twitter is there for... I think it's something like facebook... but... actually... I don't have a frigging clue what it is.

never found anything I looked for on Yahoo but they were happy enough to spam the screen with a dyslexic's nightmare worth of clutter.

Their web design philosophy has always been the opposite of google. Where google says "what can we remove while still providing service" yahoo has always asked "is it technically possible to wedge some more into one page?". Highest possible information density vs lowest possible information density.

I was shocked to recently discover that yahoo and AOL put together pretty much own the genre of "tech for non techs" websites and blogs. They are absolutely HUGE in that genre. The type that thinks being "in

Twitter is for things you like. If there's a local restaurant you like, maybe they will send notices of their daily specials now and then. If there's a musician you like, maybe they'll let their followers know that tour dates have been announced or that their new album is almost out. Going to a convention? The convention feed might let you know when event schedules change. Maybe a columnist you like will make occasional points that supplement their regular writing.

I used to use Yahoo for groups a little, but not really much. But the main thing that I use Yahoo! for daily now is Yahoo finance. The company details, good graphing options and real-time stock prices as well as portfolio tracking (in real time with full transaction history and taking into account transaction fees etc) is what I like about it. Any good alternatives to that?

Only every search engine and stock brokerage in the entire world. That's all.

Its like my neighbor chopping down his backyard apple tree and me wondering where the world will get apples now.

Why if YHOO went out of business, I'd... umm... not even notice... now that you mention it, are they still in business?